1 Curating Photography in Australia Dr Daniel

Curating Photography in Australia Dr Daniel Palmer (Monash University) & Dr Martyn Jolly (ANU) This paper derives from some early research into the various forces currently influencing photography curating in Australian art galleries. We are especially interested in new technologies such as the internet, but more generally the protean nature of the medium itself. Naturally, to better understand the present, we start with a few glimpses of the past. The Pre-History Although the institutional collecting and curating of photography didn’t begin in earnest until the 1970s, in the five or so decades before then the powerful idea of collecting photographs was intermittently discussed, at various levels of institutional authority, with various degrees of vigour. At the end of the First World War, the amateur photographic magazine the Australasian Photo Review called for a ‘national collection of Australian photographic records’. The Mitchell Library was one of several who responded positively to this idea, even suggesting a list of twelve different categories of photographs which amateurs could take for a future repository. However the librarians didn’t follow through on their initial positive noises and collections failed to materialise. Thirty years later, at the end of the Second World War, the idea of a national collection was raised again. Contemporary Photography devoted an entire issue to the new sharp bromide enlargements Harold Cazneaux had made of his Pictorialist negatives of Old Sydney, and declared that they ‘would be a valuable acquisition for the Mitchell Library or Australian Historical Societies.’ However, once more the library failed to follow through, and Cazneaux’s photographs remained uncollected. However, the interest in photography as an Australian tradition and the persuasiveness of the idea of significant public collections of historic 1 photographs, continued to build. (APR covers) By the 1960s both libraries and state galleries were beginning to make serious policy commitments to collecting photographs. The aims were to both collect photographs as documents of Australian life, and to record the importance of photography as a visual medium.i The State Art Galleries The NGV story is exemplary here. Under Director Eric Westbrook, despite forthright opposition from some members (one referred to it as “cheat’s way of doing a painting”, the Trustees approve the establishment of Department of Photography in 1967.ii The first work to enter the collection – David Moore's documentary photograph Surry Hills Street (1948) – was acquired through a grant from Kodak.iii In the same year the NGV imported The Photographer’s Eye, a touring exhibition from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which had been the first art museum to establish a Department of Photography in 1940.iv The exhibition was curated by MoMA’s John Szarkowski, the most influential photography curator of the second half of the twentieth century, as a statement of his formalist position on photographic aesthetics, a didactic concern “with photographic style and with photographic tradition”v. Its title was pastiched in a local version, The Perceptive Eye (1969–1970). By 1973 the yet to be opened National Gallery of Australia had purchased its first photograph, an artistic confection by Mark Strizic that looked more like a print than a photograph. Two years later the AGNSW was laying the foundation for its collection with the acquisition, exhibition and book on the early twentieth century photographs of Harold Cazneaux, collected by them as fine-art Pictorialist prints, rather than as the sharp bromide enlargements that had been published by Contemporary Photography in 1948. In this period the dual nature of the photograph as both a carrier of historical and social information, and an aesthetic art object and exemplar of a tradition, which had co-existed within the formulations of the previous decades, was finally separated between libraries and galleries. Library 2 collecting focused on the photograph as a document of Australian life. For example in 1971 the National Library of Australia clarified its collection policy: it would only collect photographs as examples of photographic art and technique from the period up to 1960, leaving post-1960s ‘art for art’s sake’ photography to the new state and federal gallery photography departments.vi The stage was set for the much-vaunted ‘Photo Boom’ of the 1970s, when, as Helen Ennis has pointed out, the baby boomer generation turned to photography for its contemporaneity in the context of a counter-cultural energy.vii Galleries and libraries found themselves embedded in the newly constructed infrastructure of the Whitlam era: the newly established Australia Council, rapidly expanding tertiary courses in photography, short lived magazines and commercial galleries, and the establishment of the Australian Centre for Photography in 1974. In this context the need to define photography as both a tradition and a new language became more urgent. And, as had been the case in the previous decades, overseas models were crucial.viii Thus Athol Shmith, a key member of the NGV Advisory Committee set up in the late 1960s, corresponded and travelled regularly to Europe. David Moore, one of the key figures in the establishment of the Australian Centre for Photograhy in Sydney, was familiar with plans for the International Centre for Photography in New York. And the first director of the ACP, Graham Howe, was brought back from a stint at the London Photographers’ Gallery.ix In addition, the longed-for acknowledgement from overseas materialised in the form of John Szarkowski himself, who was invited on a ‘papal’ tour by the ACP in 1974. Szarkowski gave six public lectures titled “Towards a Photographic Tradition’x. The purpose of the national tour “was to liberate photography from the world of technique and commerce and to suggest that it could also be of absorbing artistic and intellectual interest.”xi Although Szarkowski’s approach was put under sustained stress during the period of postmodernism – especially by feminist critics – his ‘formalist’ approach to the medium continued to dominate way that photography was 3 understood in the art museum for the ensuing decades. Even as the discourse emerged of an Australian tradition with, for instance, the NGV’s investment in Australian documentary photographers in the late sixties, this was embedded in a model of Euro-American modernism.xii As Ennis puts it, “The argument for ‘photography as art’ was based on the critical position of Modernism. Photography was considered to be a medium with its own intrinsic characteristics”.xiii At the Art Gallery of NSW Gael Newton deployed a clear art historical teleology, with the acquisition of Pictorialist photography by Harold Cazneaux and other members of the Sydney Camera Circle forming the foundation for the collection. Pictorialism was important to Newton because it was a: ‘conscious movement, aimed at using the camera more creatively’xiv Her exhibitions of Harold Cazneaux and Australian Pictorial Photography in 1975 closely followed by a monograph on Max Dupain in 1980, seen as the modernist successor to the Pictorialists. However, the galleries also engaged with the contemporary art photography of the graduates from the new art schools, as well as emerging postmodern ideas. For instance the title of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ 1981 exhibition Reconstructed Vision defined this new style of work against, but within the trajectory of, the newly established historical traditions. In Melbourne a slightly different but equivalent art historical strategy was taking place within the institution of the NGV. This included the mass importation of canonical images from overseas. For instance, shortly after her appointment, the NGV’s inaugural curator (and first ever curator of photography in Australia), Jennie Boddington, ordered Farm Security Administration re-prints from the Library of Congress’s reproduction service.xv However at the same time the NGV also exhibited Carol Jerrems in 1973 and Bill Henson in 1975.xvi The Libraries While galleries were using art historical strategies to embed photography within their structures, libraries were also confirming their commitment to photography, but as a non aesthetic-object based, content-driven, curatorial 4 strategy. While the subjectivist photo boom of the seventies, combined with Modernist and Postmodernist teleologies, drove the aesthetic strategies of galleries, the nationalistic socially cohesive agendas of things like the 1988 Bicentenary drove the content-based strategies of library photo collecting. In a forerunner to today’s participatory online photographic projects, in 1983 Euan McGillivray and Matthew Nickson proposed a snapshot collecting project, ‘Australia as Australians saw it’, which would copy photographs in the possession of individuals, then index them and make them accessible through the latest technology. During the Bicentenary year Alan Davies, curator at the State Library of New South Wales, travelled to twenty-three country towns and copied about seven thousand vernacular photographs from 576 individuals under the title ‘At Work and Play’, made accessible by a videodisc keyword search. The Present Moment Fast forward to the present. Over the intervening 40 years, since the establishment of various departments and the ACP, the boundaries of photography have expanded. However galleries have largely kept to the historical trajectories inaugurated in the 1970s. In the 1980s,

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